Product Gallery

So we mentioned that we received two USB 3.0 cards, and that's true. If you only needf USB 3.0 and not SATA6G  then  you can also opt to purchase that small card that you can see on the right. This is the MSI Star USB 3.0 card with the very same NEC chip, yet without SATA 6G.

Here you can see it inserted into a 1x slot, very sexy and small, easy to configure. All card demonstrated today do need a driver installation though as windows does not have native support for them (just yet).

When we zoom in at the PCB we notice that things are just much simpler on this PCIe 1x card, just the NEC controller and you are good to go. Some remarks though, this solution offers great USB 3.0 connectivity but on it's end it connects to the P55/X58 chipset via x1 lanes of PCIe 1.0 that provided  'only' 250 MB/sec bandwidth. Though that is below full USB 3.0 capacity, that's still a truckload of bandwidth for USB devices.

The JMB_USB1 connector again needs to lead to a USB header on your motherboard to obtain and draw it's 5V power from.

And here we see the MSI Star USB 3.0 controller seated in our mockup system with a USB 3.0 cable inserted, again these cables will be colored blue for easy recognition. We'll get into the cable in the next chapter though.